Annabel Lee

And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me

Before making a laundry list of the shit pile of baggage you have been carrying around with you since adolescence, before admitting errors and making amends for them, before turning a new page and pretending to have learned how to live life anew, before taking steps 2 through 12 comes the very first step of finding yourself face-first in a pool of snot and tears, wiping the bathroom tile with your designer cocktail dress, realizing dimly through the chemical and emotional haze that you no longer have the power to put things right side up again, not even yourself.

Step one is to admit that you are powerless and that your life has become unmanageable. Unless you really meant to end up mopping up the floor with your hairdo…

Beyond this “here and now”; beyond the coffee and the cigarettes, and the melting ice cubes in an abandoned glass of scotch, and the jazz moaning from the stereo, competing with the moaning from the bedroom; beyond the tangled bodies caught in the nets of tumbled sheets; beyond the “here” and beyond the “now” our lives had become a hot mess. It wasn’t about love, it was about the immediate gratification of self-medication with all the wrong pills. And the knotted, tangled mess of our lives snagged all the more on every word we didn’t mean, on every broken promise we never intended to keep, unraveling further still. Junkies jonesing for their next fix, we didn’t clean up and rehab and twelve-step our way back into being productive members of society. We just changed dealers and upped our dosage for good measure.

In love with our heartbreak more than we had ever been with each other, we found our greatest release in tears: the sheets never dried from the mixture of indeterminate bodily fluids. The unrestrained violence of passion (whatever passion it happened to be) was the only fix that’d do the trick - and each time we were hurting for more; our only sanctity that became our eventual undoing.

Life had finally become unmanageable and out of focus, as my contacts kept flowing out with the tears.